The Sheep Detective's Cleverest Detail Is Hidden In Plain Sight [Exclusive]

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At first glance, "The Sheep Detectives" doesn't resemble anything close to a classic Agatha Christie-style murder mystery whodunit. For one thing, most Christie mysteries (and those which closely take after her, such as Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" films) are set in a single, compact location. For another, the majority of the principle characters are human beings, and are not, well, sheep. This particular conceit is referenced in the film's title, a more direct moniker than author Leonie Swann chose for her source novel, "Three Bags Full." The film's title isn't a feint, though, as the movie is intentionally a hybrid of a whodunit and a talking animal film. To make the mash-up even clearer, the movie boasts an all-star cast of actors for the sheep characters (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bryan Cranston lend their voices, among others) as well as stars for the on-screen humans (Hugh Jackman, Emma Thompson, etc).

Yet while "The Sheep Detectives" gave itself license with this premise to veer off in any direction it wished, the filmmakers sought to make it as strong a whodunit as any of the classics in that genre. That was certainly the intention on director Kyle Balda's part, as he revealed to me during a recent interview for /Film. Even though the movie is set in and around a small town in the English countryside surrounded by idyllic, pastoral farmland, Balda sought to keep the story's sense of mystery, menace, and intrigue alive throughout. As the director explained to me, the secret to accomplishing this was that age-old adage: location, location, location.

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Generally, no one thinks of a farm as a claustrophobic, enclosed space where danger lurks around every corner (cornfields are another matter). Yet Balda knew that one of the tenets of a good whodunit is the suspense garnered by the characters knowing a murderer is in their midst. As he elaborated:

"When I think about [Agatha Christie] movies or you think about any kind of murder mystery film, you often have the sense of like being locked in a house with the killer, one of us is [the killer]. Or think about 'Clue' or something like that, even if it's more comedic, and that gives you a sense of the mystery, too. So I was thinking visually about how to do that with the locations."

There are several ways that Balda could've gone too far with trying to evoke this sense of mystery. Even something like having the whole farm surrounded by an imposing fence would've made the intention a bit too obvious. Instead, Balda's solution was rather ingenious, and all it involved was the right perspective:

"So [Hugh Jackman's character] George's farm, while it's very pastoral and very like rolling green hills, for me it was really important that we didn't have a farm that had a really strong horizon line where you could see other cities and other settlements and things like that, to make it feel like even the farm itself was enclosed like a locked room murder mystery."

This choice really speaks to Balda's visual prowess, as it demonstrates an understanding of how the human eye and mind work in conjunction with each other. In other words, he knows that we don't need to literally see an enclosure, we just need the illusion of it.

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One of the delights of "The Sheep Detectives" is how large its ensemble is. Yet that could've been an issue when it came to the film's climactic "Thin Man"-style moment where the killer is revealed. In most "locked room" whodunits, the group of suspects is either usually small, or whittled down one by one. "The Sheep Detectives" is not a film with a high body count, so Kyle Balda had to try and find a way to include not just his characters in the climax, but also the feeling of the various environments they're from. Fortunately, he was able to find a real-life town in England which (mostly) accommodated his needs:

"Then the town of Denbrook, which is actually Hamilton in the English countryside, that is also nestled very beautifully inside of a valley. [...] What was great [was] the church, which is a really important location, and how everything was related. The only thing that was missing was the police station, which we had to kind of turn another building into a police station. But when Officer Tim [Nicholas Braun] is giving his big Poirot-esque speech at the end, you are surrounded by — you can see the rolling hills in the distance, you see the church, the inn, the police station, all the buildings that are symbols of all the characters, they're all there in the same space. So you can see all the relationships there."

Again, most audiences watching the film for the first time probably wouldn't notice these details. Yet their inclusion and clever construction helps the movie feel that much more like a classic example of its genre. For film buffs in love with the craft of cinema, this is our type of sheep.

"The Sheep Detectives" is playing in theaters everywhere now.